help but wonder whether he is conflating race and culture (were these musicians capable of providing artistic leadership simply because they had dark skin?). In addition, his (tacked-on) acknowledgment that blacks aren’t the only skilled performers might leave some nonblack musicians and listeners wondering about the legitimacy of their involvement with jazz. Williams’s masculinist version of tradition rests on the belief that the deeds of African American men are central to any understanding of jazz. Indeed, the narrative he presents has its support in what he sees as the determining roles of race and culture and in the play of history and memory: he chose outstanding African American male performers and composers from the much wider universe of musicians whose work he knew (remembered) and, through writing and argumentation, fashioned them into a now foundational account.
Williams’s invented tradition is, of course, not the only one: writers like André Hodeir (1956) and Gunther Schuller (1968) had already assembled similar pantheons of greats to support their own visions of a jazz tradition. Interestingly, all three brought to their work ideas and prescriptions originating outside the music they discussed. Williams, a former English student enamored of the New Criticism he read in college, was interested in the degree to which close reading of recordings could illuminate jazz’s artistic qualities (Gennari 1991, 2006). Hodeir and Schuller both brought concert music backgrounds to their encounters with and writings on jazz. Whatever their backgrounds, these three writers molded what they saw as primarily African American musical practices in the image of Western literary and musical traditions.8 Along with a number of others (e.g., Baraka 1963; Tirro 1977; Collier 1978; Sales 1984; Porter et al. 1993; Gridley 1997), moreover, they have created what we might call the master narrative of jazz history—one concerned with rapid advances in harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and successive stylistic permutations spearheaded by a number of “great men,” Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, among them. Taken together, those musicians and their body of recordings form the central core of jazz: without due consideration of their work, the argument might go, no understanding of the music is possible.
Other writers have convincingly pointed out all there is to critique in the resulting narrative (DeVeaux 1991;Tomlinson 1991; Gabbard 1995; Tucker 2000). In effect, such writing can do little more than present a view of jazz history as selective as the memories it attempts to organize. The point is not that being selective is inherently bad. No single historical work can be truly comprehensive: some stories, some figures, some styles have to be omitted or discussed less extensively. Selective or not, though, the wide acceptance of Williams, Hodeir, and Schuller’s interpretations has allowed them to become a baseline for discussions of the roles of race, culture, history, and memory in jazz. At one and the same time, they provide evidence for both those who endorse their visions and those who might take a different view.
Although it is impossible to say how widely Williams’s work informed subsequent debates, by the late 1970s the nature of the jazz tradition was also being discussed publicly by musicians and critics, who prominently featured the catchphrase “in the tradition.” Indeed, the phrase might have entered wide circulation as the title of a 1979 LP by saxophonist Arthur Blythe.9 Blythe was among a number of musicians based in New York City in the 1970s who developed their craft in semicommercial loft spaces in Lower Manhattan. At the time and since, performances in these spaces were celebrated for wide-ranging, exploratory music that frequently fell outside the stylistic parameters that club owners and record executives thought marketable.10
In that context, Blythe’s work is notable for its eclectic but respectful embrace of the past. In an interview published shortly after the album’s release, he explained why he chose the approach he did: “What prompted me to do that album now was not an attempt to be part of any trend, because several players are going back to the tradition, but just a sense that now the feeling would be right for an album like this…. The music on In the Tradition is basic and fundamental to so-called jazz. If you don’t acknowledge anything of that nature then what are you doing?” (Blumenthal 1980, 64). Indeed, he amplifies his comment later in assessing his own work as well as that of like-minded performers: “People don’t have to be innovative to be creative. For a while everybody was trying to be innovative, but everybody isn’t. I’ve always felt that the innovative thing comes about when one does his homework being creative…. You don’t have to reject everything that has been dealt with already and go look for the new horizons, because you could be out in the dark where you don’t see shit” (Blumenthal 1980, 64).11 On the recording he leads his quartet through compositions by Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Fats Waller. His repertoire choices repeat, in a different medium, the canonizing gestures of earlier writers, but with a signal difference. Through the inclusion of two original compositions, one might say that Blythe sees himself as someone capable not only of playing in the tradition, but also of adding to it. One result of his recording, as Francis Davis suggested in a piece originally published in 1983, was the addition of a new phrase to the discourse on jazz: “When Arthur Blythe formed a quartet … and began mixing tunes by Ellington, Waller, Monk, and Coltrane in with his originals, he gave a movement—or more precisely, a moment—its name and unintentionally became its figurehead. Any performance that swings or follows a chord sequence or makes an overt reference to the past is now said to be in the tradition. And any performance which doesn’t do any of those things isn’t” (Davis 1986, 194–95).
Thus, although many commentators have associated a “neoconservative” return to traditional playing with the rise of Wynton Marsalis in the early 1980s (Pareles 1984; Sancton 1990), Blythe’s comments make clear that other musicians were motivated to explore previous styles without the prompting of the young trumpeter. Indeed, many of the issues that would be part of the debate regarding tradition and conservatism in the 1980s and ’90s are prefigured in Blythe’s statement and his work.12
Through the 1980s, greater investment by major recording labels, more extensive media coverage, and the institutionalization of jazz in schools and performing arts institutions strengthened the related visions of tradition presented by Williams, Blythe, and, eventually, Marsalis. Many of the musicians who would become prominent figures in the mid-1990s had their interest in acoustic jazz sparked by the evidence of a venerable jazz tradition around them. Critic Tom Piazza describes the era in this way: “At the beginning of the 1980s, it would have been hard to imagine young musicians who were playing demanding acoustic jazz being signed to major labels…. But by 1990 they were appearing constantly, and at an amazing rate” (Piazza 1997, 96). While the interest young musicians and fans were displaying might have been regarded as a sign of the music’s vitality, there were critics who were less sanguine about the newcomers. “Predictably,” Piazza continues,
the phenomenon … stirred up a backlash among reviewers … with odd racial overtones, as many of the music’s young players were, for the first time in quite a while, African-American. The gist of the attacks was that the young musicians, instead of making a Coltrane-like, self-immolatory journey of self-discovery, were focusing too much energy studying previous work in the idiom. Along with this, the attacks ran, they paid entirely too much attention to their appearance—dressing in suits and ties with a sophistication that hadn’t been seen in jazz musicians since the Miles Davis of the mid-1960s[,] and this effort was taken to be symptomatic of the superficiality of the Yuppie ’80s. There was a sneering, hostile quality to many of the attacks; the young musicians were being characterized as “neo-conservative,” “reactionary,” and “Reaganite.” … Some enlightened soul even came up with the snide phrase “young black men in suits” to characterize the movement. (97)13
As the decade ended and Lincoln Center chose Wynton Marsalis to be the artistic director of its summer “Classical Jazz” series, the attacks grew more vicious. Critics regarded young black men in suits as something more pernicious than conservative: they were antiwhite.
In a widely cited Down Beat interview (Crouch 1987), Marsalis had stressed the need for budding jazz musicians to study the work of the masters. And, since all of the masters he named were African
